There’s something about watching bad horror flicks from the 1990s that I always find amusing.  This week’s film, Brainscan (1994), really hits that amusement in that it features a teen protagonist living in an attic bedroom full of crazy audio-visual gadgetry that would have been wildly impractical at the time.  The film gives that 1990s vision of what the near-near-future would look like, with high-tech communications technology based on Windows 3.1.

The lead character, horror-obsessed teen Michael Brower, spends his time in relative isolation in his gadget-filled attic, but also leads a horror movie club at his school.  His best friend Kyle is a lovable doofus, and Michael creepily scopes out his neighbor, Kimberly, who is pretty obviously aware what Michael is doing.

Kyle tells Michael of a cutting edge new interactive experience, the titular Brainscan.  The game promises the ultimate experience in terror.  Michael, jaded by the death of his mother, an absentee father, and lackluster scares, calls the number (1-800-555-FEAR) and sets off down a path of cyber murder.

Michael plays the first disc, which hyper-simulates a murder.  He is initially thrilled by the rush of the reality of the experience.  Naturally, the next day he sees a news report about a local murder, and realizes the victim is the man he “killed” in the game the night before.

With this revelation, the second Brainscan disc arrives, but this time, its creepy narrator emerges from the television screen.  He is Trickster, who looks and acts something like Alice Cooper with a mohawk.  Trickster urges Michael to keep playing, as Michael descends deeper and deeper into a world of murder, with gruesome amounts of collateral damage.

The rest of the film consists of Michael struggling with his actions in the game and their impact on his world, as we as his conflict with both local law enforcement and Trickster.  It culminates in a showdown with Trickster in Kimberly’s bedroom.

The film cops out with a cheesy deus ex machina, but the journey itself is interesting.  Brainscan is not a good movie, but it’s an interesting little time capsule of early 1990s technology, as well as the obsession at the time with virtual reality.  As a tech-obsessed child in the 1990s, I remember what it was like in the days before smartphones, when the promise of what computer technology could do was still fresh and exciting, before the iPhone sent us down our current path of endless apps and ads.  It was a glorious time to be alive, even though I couldn’t afford any of the cool gadgets of the era.

Oh, well.  It was fun to live (although, not to kill!) through this cheesy relic of the ancient past.